JB Articles

Load Speed and Mobile Compatibility

Speed / Load Time

Good page load times are an often underrated (and increasingly important) SEO signal as well as vital for usability reasons. Recently Google made the change to ‘mobile-first’ indexing, making load times on mobile devices more important than ever. See here for how speed relates to SEO. 

Internal Duplicate Content

One of the most common technical problems we see is duplicate and near-duplicate content. Often this arises from faceted navigation systems, for example the color, size, or style selection dropdowns or tick boxes on ecommerce sites.

How to Avoid External Duplicate Content

In addition to site features and configuration issues that can generate duplicate content listings, there are additional external factors that can cause similar issues.

Review embedding

It is known that providing reviews for products and services can be a highly effective quality signal to potential customers. Leveraging things like google or amazon reviews makes good sense from a conversion standpoint.

Additional Considerations: WCAG Compliance and Downtime

What it is

The time your site spends unreachable by users due to technical issues (e.g. server crash).

Why it matters

While no one thinks having your site down is good, it’s often under-appreciated just how bad it can be for SEO. Downtime is a serious negative quality signal for search engines. As a business they specialize in sending users to high-value content. If your site is down, this represents a significant loss to their credibility and value for their customers. Downtime matters more than you might think!

Root Domains and SSL

There are several common configuration options that can lead to issues if not addressed and made consistent.

www vs. non-www

Both a www and non-www version of pages can be live and accessible. It doesn’t typically matter which version is used as long as one is selected and made canonical. 

In cases where both are/have been in use, prior to standardizing this, check to see which version holds greater domain authority and inbound links.

Keyword Phrases & Difficulty

What can keyword research tell me about target terms?

As the choices made at this stage will underpin all future on-site SEO efforts, high quality research is vital. For example, we would seek to understand the way geographical terms are used by the target market, and at what level. Do people search for ‘chocolate donuts usa’, ‘chocolate donuts new york’, ‘chocolate donuts in brooklyn’,  ‘chocolate donuts near me’, or none of those?

Competing Successfully in SEO

What is the big picture for SEO success?

Content-level SEO is the compliment to technical SEO (i.e. software level implementation and considerations for managing crawl budget and ensuring your content avoids negative quality signals).

While SEO can be complex, the three items below are the most important. They are like fruits, vegetables, and exercise. Even if the research/news in health seems like it’s changing all the time, these things are always a good idea:

Competitor Link Analysis and Link Hubs

Competitor Link Analysis

We consistently find the most useful metric of social link authority to be ‘Linking C Blocks.’ This is the total number of class C IP blocks linking across the entire domain, where Class C is analogous to an area code in a phone number. This is a good joint measure of link reach and variance.

Keyword Phrases: Making Use of the Long Tail

What is this long tail I hear so much about?

Our custom-built tool allowing us to programmatically analyze keyword history to find long tail landing page and copy targets. Uncovering such opportunities is key, because 70% of Google queries ultimately leading to a sale are driven by multiple word queries from the ‘long tail’ of the distribution.

Page Title & Tag

Keyword rich, user-focused landing pages are the foundation of good onsite SEO. Aside from body text, there are a few specific on-page ranking factors that are strong ranking factors.